Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,947 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Autumn Tale
Lowest review score: 0 Argylle
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,229 out of 7947
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7947
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7947
7947 movie reviews
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  1. Project X
    The party itself is something to see. A Pasadena blowout turns into a horny, druggy, apocalyptic scene culminating in riot police, news choppers, and a gentleman with a flamethrower.
  2. Rambo
    Rambo isn't dull. It is, however, often murkily directed, a real shortcoming in an action movie. In the big rescue-the-prisoners sequence, it's very hard to keep track of who is doing what to whom where.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beerfest
    Making a comedy that celebrates binge drinking and cretinous behavior isn't a crime against nature. Making one that's as brutally unfunny as Beerfest is.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Break-Up
    The biggest unresolved question here is why we're paying $9.50, plus popcorn, for something we can presumably get at home for free.
  5. Touch of Pink
    An hour and a half of cultural and sexual headaches only barely leavened by MacLachlan's performance.
  6. The Last Days on Mars
    Last Days aspires to the kind of no-frills, psychological terror of Duncan Jones’s brilliant “Moon” (2009) but, despite some determined performances, settles for the clichés of the abortive “Apollo 18” (2011).
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Knight and Day
    The movie’s a piece of high-octane summer piffle: stylish, funny, brainless without being too obnoxious about it, and Cruise is its manic animating principle.
  8. The Upside
    What makes The Upside work as well as it often does is how the actors are able to convey the unlikely affinity these unlikely people share.
  9. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
    The fun of these movies is that Linney often seems too refined for such greasy junk, but there she is anyway, hamming it down as it were.
  10. Must Love Dogs
    While Lane is her typical winning self, the film is mawkish. The more we're cajoled to root for Sarah Nolan, the divorced preschool teacher she plays, the more Must Love Dogs stops resembling a movie and starts feeling like a greeting card.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    IF
    IF is nonetheless an enjoyable watch, and a surprisingly gentle one, despite its bumbling cast of fiends, rascals, and other overlooked creatures.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Honest Thief
    It’s perfectly generic on-demand product that will eat up an hour and a half of your life and be immediately forgotten.
  13. A Good Man in Africa
    A Good Man in Africa has its sensibilities in the right place, and sometimes its wit, too, but its shenanigans can't mask a certain shortfall. [09 Sep 1994, p.53]
    • Boston Globe
  14. Spaceballs
    Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do. After a long dry spell, Brooks is back on the money with Spaceballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.33]
    • Boston Globe
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The In-Laws
    Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that The In-Laws was directed by Andrew Fleming, who delivered the fizzy Nixon-era comedy ''Dick'' a few years back and who also had a hand in ''Grosse Pointe,'' the wicked, briefly-lived WB parody of TV teen dramas. The man obviously knows from satire, but not on the evidence of anything here.
  16. Catfish in Black Bean Sauce
    As engaging as it is ungainly and scattered.
    • Boston Globe
  17. All Over the Guy
    Little more than a screenful of boy meets boy, boy meets baggage, boy loses baggage.
  18. Jetsons: The Movie
    You're never unaware of the calculation underlying this Jetsons movie. Still, it succeeds in teleporting the clan to the movie screen. [6 July 1990, p.61]
    • Boston Globe
  19. The Watchers
    There are plenty of things that go bump in the night. “The Watchers” proves they’re only effective if you don’t sleep through them.
  20. The Mighty Ducks
    Herek's brisk pacing and skillful way with the hockey sequences gives The Mighty Ducks an urgency its manipulative copycat soul doesn't really earn. The Mighty Ducks - with its team calculatedly organized along gender as well as multi-cultural lines - is the kind of film kids like, then outgrow. [02 Oct 1992, p.49]
    • Boston Globe
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    El cantante
    Ideally, it would give you a sense of an entire people knocking the planet off its axis with a shake of their hips. If only El Cantante were that movie. Instead, it's a curiously sludgy cross between a Doomed Star biopic and a J. Lo vanity project.
  22. Yes Man
    The biggest problem with this movie - not that it's mediocre, dull, or barely written (though it's guilty on all counts). It's that Carrey himself is miscast.
  23. A Chorus Line
    Richard Attenborough's film version of the long-running Broadway musical hit A Chorus Line not only avoids the disaster that many had predicted for it, but is often surprisingly effective and enjoyable, transcending its troubled history. [20 Dec 1985]
    • Boston Globe
  24. The Heartbreak Kid
    This remake is ultimately content to be repugnant.
  25. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Greenfingers
    Plants the seeds of comedy that grow into a mild feel-good flick, but it won't reap much viewer satisfaction.
  27. Me Myself I
    A comic vehicle for that valuable Australian export, Rachel Griffiths.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Blue Streak
    A rather witty, streetwise comedy/action movie with a lot going for it.
  29. Chasing Liberty
    It's one TV-movie romp that Kristy McNichol never got around to starring in.
  30. Life of the Party
    Thoroughly vanilla comedy, a movie jammed with well-meaning girl power messages but surprisingly little edge.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last of Robin Hood
    The Last of Robin Hood plays like a laboratory control experiment gone wrong: What would happen if you made a movie with a great cast and terrible everything else?
  32. She's the Man
    A screwball comedy that made me wish I were 13 again, because this is precisely the kind of movie I would have gone nuts for in the ninth grade.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Flipped
    Sweet, smartly acted, and charmingly old-fashioned, Flipped is a minor pleasure that will strike a lot of moviegoers - those who think no one makes movies for them anymore - as a major treat.
  34. The 'Burbs
    The 'Burbs begins promisingly, as if Joe Dante is going to yank a Steven Spielberg film into Blue Velvet depths. Once the premise is laid down, however, the film deflates and empties with alarming speed. [17 Feb 1989, p.88]
    • Boston Globe
      • Posted Jun 29, 2017
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pain & Gain
    Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.
  36. The Little Rascals
    When the plot turns coy and arch as Alfalfa falls in love with a kewpie doll named Darla, however, the film turns insufferable. [05 Aug 1994, p.48]
    • Boston Globe
  37. Straw Dogs
    It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Black or White
    Despite the best of intentions, a career-best performance from Kevin Costner, and outstanding work by Octavia Spencer and child actor Jillian Estell, Black or White succumbs to some of the same stereotypes it tries to dispel.
  39. Joe Versus the Volcano
    John Patrick Shanley's Joe Versus the Volcano starts out so brilliantly, so hilariously, so imaginatively, that even as it's cracking you up, you begin worrying that the rest of the film can't possibly be that good. Sure enough, it isn't. In fact, it deflates pretty alarmingly. But at least it has that beginning. [9 Mar 1990, p.27]
    • Boston Globe
  40. Crazy in Alabama
    The pieces don't always fit together smoothly, but there's a lot of flavorful work to savor.
  41. The Tomorrow War
    The best thing in the movie is Pratt. Firmly established in not one but two franchises — Guardians of the Galaxy and the Jurassic Park reboot — he’s come a long way from Parks and Recreation. He alternates here between charming wise guy and sensitive family man: Peter Quill domesticated.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Singing Detective
    The question that has to be asked is: Why? The original six-part BBC ''Singing Detective'' remains one of the signal achievements in the history of television -- really -- and its release on DVD this past spring puts it easily within reach of the curious.
  43. Bully
    Nothing new to say, and, in the end, no real point to make.
    • Boston Globe
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Club Dread
    A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.
  45. The Bone Collector
    Washington and Jolie earn their stripes here, but more texture would have resulted, I think, in more terror.
  46. Mona Lisa Smile
    The reliable Mike Newell directs Mona Lisa Smile with such assurance that the important moments are never mawkish or dull, and he encourages the women to act with absolute conviction.
  47. American Assassin
    Trouble is, the movie’s dopiness isn’t in fact something you can get past. “American Assasinine” is frequently more like it.
  48. Evening
    Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Takers
    Takers might have made a perfectly decent little B heist movie, but someone had to go and forget to give the cameraman his Ritalin.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Factory Girl
    Factory Girl is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It's something worse: an irredeemably banal drama about some of the most protean, contradictory creative forces of the 1960s.
  51. The Son
    The Son is so concerned with trying to get an emotional rise out of the audience, to choke us with its pathos, that it fails to create believable three-dimensional characters.
  52. Pretty Persuasion
    Isn't so much awful as it is self-conscious, overdone, shallow, and just not up to the level of its star.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dragonball: Evolution
    Nearly all the actors seem to be having a good time, and the action moves so fast that you don't mind when something nuts happens.
  54. Happythankyoumoreplease
    The movie is generic and shallow in its glimpse of the love and sex lives of a handful of young New Yorkers.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Whatever Works
    Whatever Works is very minor Woody, querulous, fitfully funny, and removed from any shared reality.
  56. End of the Spear
    It's not remotely as luscious or half as bold as Malick's movie, but it is shorter and more educational.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hoodwinked!
    One aches to think what the great "Looney Tunes" directors could have done with this material.
  58. Extraordinary Measures
    The screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs affirms life and jerks tears with welcome degrees of humor and muscle.
  59. Uncharted
    Uncharted is big on isn’t-badness. Quite competently done (Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland, is the director), it’s mostly diverting, but not especially inspired.
  60. The Girl from Monday
    Numbing story.
  61. Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    Visually, the movie is surprisingly inventive, with takeoffs on everything from manga to Hokusai prints. Sure, a lot of the jokes are dumb — you got a problem with that? — but “Paws” is quite smart.
  62. Into the Blue
    Into the Blue is as much a mesmerizing aquatic expedition as it is a reasonably suspenseful action adventure.
  63. The Weight of Water
    Though it never rises to its full potential as a film, still offers a great deal of insight into the female condition and the timeless danger of emotions repressed.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Sum of All Fears
    And then there's Liev Schreiber as CIA operative John Clark. With less than 30 minutes of screen time, he's everything Affleck isn't - magnetic, clever, and delightful to watch. If only the filmmakers had possessed the courage to cast the splendid Schreiber instead of the feeble Affleck.
  65. How to Deal
    This movie is the worst episode of ''Gilmore Girls'' ever.
  66. Proof of Life
    It's absorbing, although draggy.
  67. Boomerang
    The result is a megabudget "House Party" -- amiable, colorful, filled with glamour and style. [01 Jul 1992]
    • Boston Globe
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Invasion
    Buried somewhere within the bipolar extravaganza that is The Invasion is an awfully good movie that got away.
  69. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    I was not a fan of Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" (2005), but Brooks, at least, seemed willing to concede before it was over that his movie was a terrible idea. Spurlock seems opportunistically optimistic.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    Me, I'm a Johnny Rotten man, so this limp culture-clash comedy with a heart of patchouli just made me want to stab my eyeballs out.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Greatest
    The filmmaker’s uncertainty shows itself in drably functional camerawork and an over-reliance on Christophe Beck’s tasteful piano-and-violin score.
  72. Colombiana
    It's basically a blaxploitation movie stretched to meaninglessly international proportions that leans on tired Colombian stereotypes. But if Saldana's aiming to be some kind of new Pam Grier, she needs to save more than herself.
  73. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
    The early dilemma in "Rise of the Silver Surfer " is this: Save the world or marry Jessica Alba . Your conscience says, "Save the world." But the Maxim reader in you knows better.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Justice League
    Justice League may play well to hardcore DC cognoscenti, but if you’re not a fan, the movie’s failings are easy to enumerate. First off, the villain’s a dud.
  75. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    The movie is long and uniquely bad, the last of Stephenie Meyer's four books greedily tortured into two installments.
  76. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    On most levels his performance is as flat as his abs: very early Wahlberg.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Firewall
    A movie like this needs a suave, amoral villain, so here's Paul Bettany.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mr. Brooks
    A fertile example of the Studio Film Gone Berserk, where too many characters and too many story lines geometrically progress until a level of blissful absurdity is reached.
  79. The Little Vampire
    Sweetly macabre charmer.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Maid in Manhattan
    It's Lopez who's the proper focus of this dream. So intent has she been on becoming a superstar in the past few years that many people have forgotten that, given decent material, she can act.
  81. Life as a House
    This one is nearly as bad as it gets, suggesting that all the wrong people were wielding the sledgehammers here.
    • Boston Globe
  82. Latter Days
    Such a well-meaning but unambitious work that it's tempting to take it seriously even as you dismiss it.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Love Me If You Dare
    French films have long specialized in depicting the impassioned, go-for-broke infatuation known as l'amour fou. Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare may be the first to investigate l'amour annoying.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Evergreen
    An earnest, simplistic, affecting slice of low-watt indie filmmaking that goes where few American movies bother: below the poverty line.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Valiant
    The top-secret message this pigeon is carrying reads ''Wait for the DVD."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    American Dreamz
    American Dreamz pitches its softballs with style. Martin Tweed, the preeningly heartless British host of the title TV show, just may be the great comic role that has always eluded Hugh Grant.
  87. The Possession
    Oh my God, evil. What's with you? Ever since "The Exorcist," it's been the same song-and-crab-dance: Demons don't kill, divorce does.
  88. Miral
    Miral feels like gastric bypass moviemaking. It's a miniseries awkwardly stuffed in the body of a two-hour drama about the Palestinians' long struggle against the Israelis.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    To press the point, there is absolutely no need for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    By the Sea
    This prompts the perverse thought that By the Sea may simply exist as a movie for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to watch. It’s two hours of vacation, voyeurism, and celebrity marriage therapy, and you and I aren’t actually invited.
  91. The Paperboy
    I've never seen a movie like this. Not on purpose. Daniels isn't saying he's tasteful. He's just saying that his tasteless trash is as deserving of our attention as the tasteful trash we feel like we have to see. The whole thing's a crazy fantasy, like watching a porno dream it can win the Oscar.
  92. Unforgettable
    It sounds like the movie itself: contrived, implausible, derivative, and — even though both the first-time director Denise Di Novi and screenwriter Christina Hodson are women — misogynistic.
  93. The Marine
    What follows is serviceable action set to music you'd find in a video game -- or a military ad.
  94. Sniper
    It's mostly just buddies-bonding-over-bullets stuff. [29 Jan 1993, p.24]
    • Boston Globe
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Click
    If it doesn't quite represent the new, improved Adam Sandler, it shows him almost desperately trying to figure out who that might be.
  96. Blindness
    A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of José Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.
  97. The Leisure Seeker
    The Leisure Seeker is slack and episodic in a way that only a committee could love. The sense of energy and surprise that one expects from a road movie is nowhere to be found. The pleasure of Mirren and Sutherland’s company is considerable, but not that considerable.
  98. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Historians might demand a little more history from Elizabeth: The Golden Age. But soap opera loyalists could hardly ask for more soap.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pride and Glory
    Everything in this good-cop/bad-cop action drama is shrouded in gray and attended by wailing. This isn't a feel-good genre, granted, but does it have to feel this bad?
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sweet Home Alabama
    Isn't just lame; it's neutered.
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